Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ The internet is eating your memory, but something better is taking its place

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

According to the author, fears that that we are losing our ability to remember are ungrounded. Sure, we may remember less, but that's only because we know we have the information stored online somewhere, and meanwhile we are saving our memory for more important stuff, like where the other memories are located. But the more interesting part of this post is a reference to earlier work describing the way we can do this together as a society, forming a computer network model of human transactive memory, as described by Daniel Wegner in 1995. "Human beings in pairs and groups form message-passing directory-sharing memory systems. This means that in social networks we get many of the benefits of having greatly expanded memory systems."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Oct 08, 2024 12:09 p.m.

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